Amazon Global Logistics - Poor service and cost implications

My experience is as below.

I couldn’t find much info on the forum regarding AGL. I decided to send some stock in January as an interim before I shipped some FCL’s direct to my 3PL’s. I shipped 20CBM to the UK and 20CBM to Germany.

It was more expensive that my traditional freight forwarder, but with the advantage of going direct to an FC.

This was the worst mistake I have made with amazon FBA. The goods finally arrived into FBA last week. Over four months from booking to landing in the FC’s.

We all know there is shipping capacity issues but this is beyond a reasonable delay. When discussing with the point of contact who helped me setup AGL he talked as if there would be not issues. Published transit times looked good. Once shipped the AGL point of contact ignored emails. Seller support and AGL support would close cases saying they could not help as the shipments were closed. So I spent the best part of 4 months not having a clue where my stock was and when it would land. The two shipments to different countries both suffered the same delays and problems. So I do not believe this was a one off.

• two week delay in booking in with supplier
• Once booking received goods sat in Chinese warehouse for over a month
• FBA shipments closed as they were over 90 days old lost all updates.
• Once landed both shipments took 3 weeks to clear customs.
  *Took about 10-15 days to land at the FC

Amazon have now massively reduced my Maximum Seller Limit and I can’t get any units in unless I remove most of the stock that landed with AGL. I have about 30 - 40 days worth if stock that came in with AGL. So not massively overstocked on those lines and I still have plenty of CBF storage left.

Units arrived too late to take advantage of the free removal offer. Now I have to remove about 700 units at my cost if I want to keep other lines in FBA stock. Only to send them all back in again over the course of the next four weeks.

Q1 I was able to send in between 400 and 800 units per SKU well over 10000 units. now I can send in a total of 1066 units across all SKU’s.

In short a huge amount of lost revenue from sales. Another £600+ on removal fees to be able to ship in other sku’s. Then the costs of reworking the removals and shipping back to amazon is £1000+ plus.